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CLASS  OF  1886;  PHD.  THE  JOHNS  HOPKINS  UNIVERSITY 


OF  THE 

UMVERSIY  OF  MM!  CAROLINA 

HE  WEEKS  COLLECTION 

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The  Struggle  of 
the  Confederacy 


J.  L.  M.  CVRRY 


Reprint  from  Publications  of  Southern  History 
Association,  November,  190! 


The  Struggle  of  the 
Confederacy.1 


By  J.  L.  M.  Curry. 

The  writing  of  Confederate  History  passes  through 
stages  or  cycles,  and  many  years  will  elapse  before  the  last 
word  is  said.  Naturally,  the  military  history  first  claimed 
attention,  and  among  the  best  and  most  conclusive  books 
on  that  aspect  of  the  subject  are  Henderson's  Jackson  and 
Wyeth's  Forrest.  Besides  Davis,  Stephens,  Bledsoe  and 
"The  Southern  States  in  their  Relations  to  the  Constitution 
and  the  Resulting  Union,"  the  civil  side  has  elicited  The 
Civil  History  of  the  Confederate  States,  reviewed  in  this 
magazine  for  Sept.,  1901,  Smith's  History  of  the  Con- 
federate Treasury,2  and  Callahan's  Diplomatic  History  of 
the  Southern  Confederacy.  Dr.  Schwab,  turning  aside 
from  tactical  and  technical  problems  in  warfare  and  partial- 
ly from  the  political  aspects,3  considers  financial  and  in- 
dustrial phenomena,  as  a  study  of  economic  history  under 
the  abnormal  conditions  of  war.  Before  going  further, 
it  gives  us  pleasure  to  say  that  the  author  has  shown  a 
historic  spirit,  consulting  and  well  using  many  authorities 
not  generally  accessible,  presenting  by  far,  with  the  excep- 
tion of  Prof.  Smith,  the  most  complete  account  of  the 
fiscal  history  of  the  Confederacy,  and  showing  himself  fre- 
quently far  above  the  incompleteness  and  prejudices  which 

2The  Confederate  States  oe  America,  1861-1865.  A  Financial 
and  Industrial  History  of  the  South  during  the  Civil  War.  By 
John  Christopher  Schwab.  New  York;  Charles  Scribner's  Sons, 
1901,  pp.  XI-j-332,  index,  cloth,  $2.50. 

2  Professor  Smith's  study  of  the  Confederate  Treasury,  appear- 
ing in  these  Publications  for  Jan.,  Mar.  and  May,  1001,  is  the 
fullest  investigation  of  the  subject  in  existence. 

3  When  the  author  ventures  upon  political  statements,  he 
stumbles  grievously. — See  pp.  189,  212,  &c. 


disfigure  so  many  works  on  the  Confederacy.  Contem- 
porary records  are  scarce  and  fragmentary,  but  Dr. 
Schwab  has  been  industrious  in  hunting  them  up  and  skil- 
ful in  using  them.  The  harshest  criticism  which  can  justly 
be  made  is  that  he  uses  trustworthy  and  untrustworthy 
material  with  equal  freedom  and  confidence  and  from  lack 
of  personal  knowledge  of  some  of  the  authorities  attaches 
undue  importance  to  writers  who  never  saw  any  thing 
pertaining  to  the  Confederacy  except  through  jaundiced 
eyes.  No  practical  good  would  result  from  an  exposure 
of  these  authorities,  which  any  one  familiar  with  the  men 
and  events  of  the  war  between  the  States  would  reject  as 
utterly  unreliable. 

The  difficulties  and  obstacles  encountered  by  the  Con- 
federacy were  unavoidable  and  insurmountable  in  conse- 
quence of  the  length,  magnitude  and  exhausting  character 
of  the  war.  Chiefest  among  these  was  the  currency, 
essential  to  the  government  in  its  varied  and  imperative 
needs,  to  the  people  in  their  ordinary  pursuits,  and  needed 
in  all  industrial  enterprises.  The  war  was  undesired,  unan- 
ticipated, unprovided  for,  by  the  South,  and  that  section,  in 
men,  resources,  accumulated  capital,  banking  facilities, 
transportation,  manufactures,  all  industries,  was  far  in- 
ferior to  its  adversary.  Mr.  Memminger,  the  Secretary  of 
the  Treasury,  and  President  Davis,  it  may  now  be  con- 
ceded, were  not  capable  financiers,  but  the  circumstances 
were  such  that  Morris,  Turgot,  Colbert,  Gladstone,  would 
have  found  themselves  amid  "a  sea  of  troubles."  No  ex- 
perience, skill,  ability,  could  have  kept  the  very  limited 
amount  of  specie  in  the  country,  or  made  rapidly  increas- 
ing bonds,  treasury  notes,  bank  notes,  promissory  notes, 
equal  in  value  to,  or  convertible  into,  gold  and  silver.  As 
the  war  went  on  and  armies  were  increased  and  blockade 
of  coasts  became  more  effective  and  area  of  unoccupied 
country  contracted  and  government  necessities  grew  to 
more  enormous  proportions,  and  facilities  of  internal  com- 
munication were  lessened,  the  circulating  medium  perform- 


ed  its  functions  less  satisfactorily  and  with  hastening  and 
unimpedible  depreciation.  Bonds,  treasury  notes,  call 
certificates,  exports  and  imports  were  less  and  less  avail- 
able to  meet  the  illimitable  expenditures.  Persons,  at 
home  and  abroad,  willing  to  advance  money  in  exchange 
for  interest-bearing  bonds  were  not  to  be  found.  ''The 
government's  hopes  that  the  redundancy  of  the  currency 
would  be  corrected  by  their  absorption  in  bonds  proved  as 
groundless  as  similar  hopes  in  the  North."  Army  requi- 
sitions ran  up  from  59^  millions  in  1861  to  670  millions  in 
1864,  and  the  estimates  during  the  year  1864  called  for 
1,500  millions  (Schwab,  55,56).  The  domestic  public  debt 
in  Oct.,  1864,  amounted  to  1,371  millions  (p.  76).  During 
the  last  year  of  the  war  the  government  was  irretrievably 
bankrupt.  Huge  floating  debts  accumulated,  unpaid  war- 
rants, &c,  were  ghosts  that  would  not  "down"  at  any  bid- 
ding of  Congress  or  the  Treasury  Department. 

It  would  be  "love's  labor  lost"  to  try  to  excuse  or  vin- 
dicate the  failure  of  the  financial  policy  of  the  Confederacy. 
The  stubborn  facts  are  before  us  and  refuse  to  accept  ex- 
planation. Let  us  concede  frankly  that  they  are  to  be 
admitted  in  their  baldness.  It  is  no  palliative  of  our  re- 
gret that  Dr.  Schwab  and  Dr.  Sumner,  with  their  great 
learning  and  ability,  and  all  other  writers.  English  and 
American,  while  condemning  the  Confederate  finances, 
have  never  been  able  to  suggest  what  would  have  been 
a  safer  policy,  or  what  would,  or  could,  have  prevented  a 
redundant  or  depreciated  currency,  or  fluctuation  and  ex- 
cess in  prices,  or  supplied  the  government  with  available 
credit  or  money. 

In  all  revolutionary  crises,  demanding  large  and  unex- 
pected uses  of  money,  or  its  representatives,  governments 
and  people  have  sustained  heavy  losses  and  repeated  the 
experiences  of  the  Confederacy.  Dr.  Schwab  with  candor 
mentions  not  a  few  parallel  instances  as  occurring  in  the 
North,  in  France,  in  Austria,  in  Italy  and  during  our  Revo- 


lutionary  struggle.  Under  Secretary  Chase's  financial 
regime,  the  Northern  banks  lost,  as  did  the  Southern,  a 
large  part  of  their  specie  to  the  government.  The  North, 
the  South,  France,  shared  in  the  same  illusion  that  interest- 
bearing  notes  would  be  held  for  investment  and  so  pre- 
vent redundancy  (89).  The  Confederate  Government 
elaborated  financial  transactions  with  foreign  houses  on 
the  security  of  exports  of  highly-prized  products,  and 
Hamilton  in  1779  urged  a  foreign  loan  as  a  remedy  for  the 
disturbed  state  of  the  currency.  During  the  Revolution, 
financial  distress  compelled  the  government  to  obtain  for- 
eign supplies  by  placing  loans  on  the  security  of  American 
products.  Both  governments  suffered  from  wastefulness 
in  securing  the  supplies  (28,  29).  The  funding  of  the  Con- 
federate debt,  a  kind  of  repudiation  which  proved  decep- 
tive in  correcting  the  redundancy  of  the  currency  and  in 
helping  the  national  credit  and  which  was  the  sure  precur- 
sor of  the  wreck  of  Confederate  finances,  was  a  copy  of  the 
devices  adopted  during  the  French  and  American  Revolu- 
tions (46,  59). 

The  reviewer  has  an  interesting  collection  of  "shin- 
plasters,"  issued  during  the  ''hard  times"  of  1837-1840,  and 
so  in  the  North  as  well  as  in  the  South,  during  the  war, 
States,  municipalities,  merchants,  innkeepers,  &c,  issued 
their  promissory  notes  making  them  redeemable  in  goods 
or  services,  or  when  a  larger  sum  was  presented  for  pay- 
ment. 

A  favorite  mode  of  bolstering  different  forms  of  paper 
currency  has  been  to  make  them  a  legal  tender,  and  the 
United  States  Congress  passed  its  first  Legal  Tender  Act, 
25  Feb.,  1862.  Treasury  notes  to  the  amount  of  $150,- 
000,000  were  authorized,  receivable  in  payment  of  all  debts, 
except  duties  and  interest  due  to  and  from  the  Federal 
Government.  This  compulsory  scheme  was  favored  by 
Secretary  Chase  although  as  Chief  Justice  he  declared 
against  its  eonstitutionalitv,  and  it  became  necessarv  after- 


wards,  as  the  Court  was  equally  divided,  to  appoint  an  ad- 
ditional judge  known  to  be  favorable  to  the  strained  con- 
struction of  the  Constitution.  In  the  Confederate  Con- 
gress bills  to  make  treasury  notes  a  legal  tender  were 
often  introduced  and  as  often  successfully  resisted.  The 
reviewer  has  the  notes  of  a  speech  made  in  the  Congress 
in  opposition  to  this  effort,  in  which  he  urged  that  such  a 
compulsory  method  of  imparting  an  artificial  value  to 
money  or  government  credit  had  universally  proved  a  fail- 
ure ;  that  it  was  an  impairment  of  contracts ;  that  the  injec- 
tion into  the  Constitution  of  a  power  not  specifically 
granted,  but  intentionally  omitted,  was  an  utter  departure 
from  the  fundamental  principles  of  a  government  which 
was  intended  to  guard  against  the  assumption  of  powers 
not  granted,  &c,  and  that  on  the  grounds  of  expediency 
the  remedy  for  the  evil  was  a  foredoomed  failure.  The 
story  of  the  Continental  currency  and  of  French  assignats 
was  cited  as  conclusive  against  the  measure. 

As  auxiliary  to  remedial  legislation  and  to  help  debtors 
in  their  distress,  the  States  passed  stay-laws,  relaxed  col- 
lection laws  and  tried  many  measures  to  limit  the  rights 
of  creditors.  These  measures  grew  out  of  the  stringency 
of  the  times,  the  diminution  of  means  wherewith  to  pay 
debts,  and  the  worthlessness  of  the  "money."  They  may 
be,  doubtless  are,  indefensible,  but  they  are  the  common 
resort  of  all  countries  controlled  by  public  opinion,  when 
panics  and  bank  suspensions  occur. 

The  Confederate  Government  in  its  sore  trials  and  in- 
ability to  reap  benefits  from  bonds  and  fiat  money  and  the 
impossibility  of  filling  coffers  by  duties  on  imports  or 
by  direct  taxation  resorted  to  a  tax  in  kind,  largely  at  the 
suggestion  and  on  the  advocacy  of  Senator  Hunter,  who 
had  been  Chairman  of  the  Finance  Committee  in  the 
Senate  of  the  United  States,  and  resorted  to  impress- 
ments which  produced  much  discontent  and  aroused  no 
little  of  the  opposition  to  the  continuance  of  the  war.    The 


aggravations  of  burdens,  already  too  heavy  to  be  borne, 
found  no  comfort  or  defence  in  the  fact  that,  under  similar 
conditions  and  with  like  complaints,  impressments  were  re- 
sorted to  during  the  French  Revolution  and  our  Revo- 
lutionary War.  The  policies  of  the  Confederate  and  of  the 
Continental  Congress  also  "ran  strikingly  parallel  in  their 
restricting  foreign  trade  and  also  in  engaging  in  it"  (256, 
266,  265). 

These  illustrations  might  be  multiplied  as  showing  that 
counterparts  of  our  action  are  easily  found  elsewhere  and 
that  our  conditions  made  a  sound  currency  and  the  col- 
lection of  sufficient  revenue  by  taxation  and  the  ordinary 
peace  methods  an  impossibility.  Only  the  survivors  of  the 
war  can  know  the  privations  and  sufferings,  physical 
and  mental,  of  that  terrible  period,  when  salt  was  often 
procured  by  digging  up  and  boiling  the  saturated  earth 
of  the  smoke  houses ;  when  coffee  was  unobtainable, 
sassafras  was  the  substitute  for  tea,  sorghum  for  sugar 
and  molasses,  medicines  were  not  to  be  had,  a  pair  of 
shoes  cost  $100.00.  a  barrel  of  flour,  $900,  hats  and  cloth- 
ing were  made  at  home  with  rudest  implements,  railways, 
in  bridges  and  roiling  stock,  were  in  a  dismantled  condi- 
tion, prices  for  the  commonest  necessaries  were  fabulous, 
and,  as  our  industries  were  almost  exclusively  agricultural, 
attempts  to  secure  material  means  to  carry  on  the  war  or 
enjoy  former  home  comforts  were  hindered  on  every  side. 

Dr.  Schwab  expresses  the  simple  but  generally  unac- 
knowledged truth  that  "it  was  the  blockade  rather  than  the 
ravages  of  the  army  that  sapped  the  industrial  strength  ot 
the  Confederacy"  (236).  It  destroyed  imports  and  exports 
as  a  basis  for  revenue  and  as  a  stimulus  to  production; 
it  made  legislation  on  trade  impotent ;  it  surrounded  the 
South  with  a  Chinese  wall ;  it  perpetuated  original  in- 
equalities in  manufactures  and  various  industries ;  it  made 
each  day  darker  and  more  ominous  by  the  helplessness  of 
industrial  improvement. 


Chapter  X  on  the  Military  Despotism  of  the  Confeder- 
ate Government  is  less  just  to  the  South  than  other  chap- 
ters and  more  partial  to  the  North,  and  relies  more  im- 
plicitly on  authorities  that  we  know  to  be  prejudiced  and 
persistently  unfavorable  to  the  Confederacy.  We  may  as 
well  admit  the  historic  truth  that  war  and  a  limited  con- 
stitution are  irreconcilable  and  that  restrictions  intended 
for  peace  are  trammels  which  like  the  fetters  on  Samson 
will  be  torn  asunder  in  a  conflict  of  life  and  death.  De- 
spotism in  an  army  seems  to  be  a  necessary  outgrowth  of 
a  protracted  and  formidable  war.  Hence  both  govern- 
ments—the Confederate  and  the  Federal — recruited  their 
forces  by  conscription,  which  tyrannous  exercise  of  power 
was  less  excusable  in  the  North  with  a  largely  preponder- 
ant population  and  with  access  to  foreign  enlistments  which 
supplied  720,000  men  to  her  army.  The  suspension  of  the 
writ  of  habeas  corpus  by  the  Confederate  Congress  was  from 
February  27,  1862,  to  August  I,  1864,  but  in  many  parts 
of  the  country  it  was  a  dead  letter.  Dr.  Schwab  (190)  uses 
this  decisive  language :  "The  Confederate  Government, 
in  suspending  the  functions  of  the  civil  authorities  at 
various  times  and  places  during  the  war,  did  not  employ 
this  extreme  war  measure  with  the  stringency  character- 
istic of  the  similar  line  of  policy  adopted  by  the  Federal 
Government.  In  the  North  the  relentless  declaration  of 
martial  law  was  much  more  effectively  and  harshly  used 
as  a  means  of  cowing  the  opposition  and  restraining  the 
disloyal,  &c."  Senator  Hoar,  in  the  Senate,  in  June  last, 
said :  "The  courts-martial  during  the  Civil  War  were  a 
scandal  to  the  civilized  world." 

Dr.  Schwab  is  satirical  in  contrasting  the  religious  re- 
vivals in  the  Southern  army  with  "the  revolting  picture 
of  moral  decadence"  which  he  finds  to  have  existed  in  the 
South.  A  distinguished  General  in  the  Union  army,  who 
illustrated  with  terrible  reality  the  aphorism,  said:  "War 
is  hell."     War  is  not  favorable  to  the  gentler  virtues,  but, 


8 

altho  my  testimony  may  be  discredited,  I  wish  to  affirm 
that  morality  in  the  South  did  not  surfer  the  decadence 
which  is  charged.  In  the  cities  there  was  some  repre- 
hensible laxity  but  in  the  villages  and  rural  districts  the 
departure  from  the  usual  correct  standard  was  not  so 
marked  as  to  distinguish  from  former  days. 

Amid  the  severities  and  sufferings  consequent  on  a  war 
of  invasion,  aggravated  and  intensified  by  unusual  condi- 
tions, the  patriotism  of  the  Southern  States  and  people 
stands  out  in  inextinguishable  glory.  Men  and  women 
never  exhibited  greater  patience,  endurance,  courage. 
"The  Southern  cause  evoked  as  much  devoted  loyalty  as 
has  been  called  forth  by  an)?  cause  in  history;  and  that 
cause  was  supported  at  a  cost  greater  than  in  any  similar 
conflict.  The  Southerners'  sacrifices  far  exceeded  those 
of  the  Revolutionary  patriots"  (312).  The  unconquerable 
devotion  to  principle  and  country  makes  a  sublime  record 
that  the  history  of  ages  will  not  surpass.  While  disinte- 
grating forces  within  were  incessant  and  irresistible,  cour- 
age and  hope  remained  until  the  tragedy  closed  at  Appo- 
matox. 

Notwithstanding,  rather  because  of  the  mild  criticism  we 
have  found  it  necessary  to  make,  we  wish  to  commend 
this  book  as  a  real  contribution  to  history  and  as  a  praise- 
worthy instance  of  how  the  asperities  of  war  have  been 
softened.  "To  the  student  of  our  country's  history  that 
of  the  Confederate  States  is  the  story  of  a  fierce  struggle 
against  overwhelming  odds,  the  culmination  of  an  inevit- 
able conflict  the  foundations  of  which  were  laid  in  an 
earlier  period.  *  *  To  the  economist  the  war  does  not 
centre  about  the  heroic  efforts  of  the  South  to  resist  the 
strategy  of  the  Northern  generals,  but  it  centres  about 
the  picture  it  presents  of  the  negation  of  normal  ecenomic 
forces"  (310"). 


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